


love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, / nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 11:07:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2022846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She does love him; she is sure of it. But she loves him the way she loved Rome when she spent a year there her junior year in college, transfixed by its ancient, terrifying beauty. Even after six months, when the sharp edges of the city’s unfamiliarity grew rounded and soft, she always knew it was not home. He loves her, too, in the bracing, merciless way that the North Atlantic loves the shore, because geography has thrown them together and now they can’t be rid of one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, / nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted on Tumblr. Comments are much appreciated!

Note: this fic takes  **[the deleted Rust/Laurie scene](http://youtu.be/89FObkqroZY)**  as canon, so you probably wanna watch it if you haven’t yet.

Thanks to [surviveawholelife](http://tmblr.co/mCD6xMNmIKxFQJqGxN6R9Dg) for help with some of the medical stuff.

 

i.

Their first conversation—not the usual exchange of pleasantries between women, but their first _real_ conversation—occurs at the bachelorette party of a mutual friend in Radiology. At such gatherings certain topics are inevitable: Laurie has been in Louisiana six months and is yet to have had a decent date.

“These fucking Southern men—no offense, Maggie—”

“None taken.”  She replies without thinking of it, without stopping to process what she should be offended by, worn down by years of defending her husband’s existence to women who call men like him “dumb rednecks” and whom he calls “insufferable Yankee cunts.”

“These good ol’ boys,” Laurie continues with audible disdain, slurring only slightly, “they’re all—just recently divorced from their doormat wives, or they’re bachelors who still live down the street from their mothers—”

Maggie wonders—idly, because she’s also a little drunk—if she’s one of those doormats. As far as she knows, Laurie doesn’t know about her separation three years previously.  People talk, though, and every doctor, nurse, intern and staff member at Baton Rouge General remembers what happened that night back in ‘95.   _I am having a private conversation with my wife_.  

 _My wife_ , he’d said, the way you’d say  _my car_ when taking the other guy’s insurance information.  

“And the guys at work, they’re even worse. Fucking doctors, so busy becoming  _doctors_  that they never figure out how to become  _men_. I just—I want a guy who does the dishes without being asked, that’s what.” She fishes a maraschino cherry out of her drink and bites at the stem angrily. “I want an  _adult_.”

Maggie thinks back to that dinner, after the remnants of spaghetti and broccoli had been cleared.  Rust had insisted on doing the dishes with an intensity that had almost frightened her.  It wasn’t the usual tiresome dance known all across the South,  _let me get that, no it’s fine, I insist, no you go and relax, well if you’re sure_.  It was as if he were doing some sort of penance.  She watched as he braced himself against the sink, hoping he was sober enough not to drop anything, but he’d handled each plate and spoon like a relic.  She and Marty leaned against the counter, talking and drinking what was left of the coffee, but Rust didn’t join the conversation until all the dishes were done and he’d watched the suds disappear down the drain.

She takes a deep breath.  She’d promised herself she’d stop doing this, especially after the incident with the one who asked Rust where he went to church. This is different, though. They all look at him, the young divorcé with his meager wardrobe and deceptively soft voice, and think  _he just needs a woman to take care of him_. But Rust can take care of himself; that isn’t his problem. Maggie isn’t sure  _what_ precisely his problem is (although she’s compiled mental dossiers on the subject that would put Marty’s case files to shame), but it isn’t that.

“I know someone,” she says.  “He’s a friend of Marty’s—no, don’t look like that—he’s from Alaska.”

ii.

Maggie’s half-convinced that the synesthesia thing is something that Marty and Rust have worked out between the two of them, as a sort of hazing ritual for Rust’s dates, or a litmus test.  Looking back, she realizes that when Jen pronounced it  _synesesia_  the evening was basically over.  The ones who look at him like he’s crazy are never seen again, but the ones who tell him to his face he’s full of shit, oddly enough, usually get a second chance.  When they play along like they know what he’s talking about when they clearly don’t, he gets this  _look_ on his face like he smells something bad, and then a few minutes later Marty excuses himself to go to the restroom, and then Rust’s pager happens to go off.  Important cop business.  He’s always very polite about it.

Laurie just nods, unfolding her napkin.  “I read Cytowic back in med school,” she says.  Rust pauses in taking a sip from his water glass and blinks slowly.

iii.

He’s handsome, which is good; he seems to either not know it or know it and resent it, which is better. His close-cropped hair seems to outline every curve and crevice in his skull (she hears the echoes of med school mantras:  _occipital, temporal, parietal, sphenoid_ ), drawing the gaze to his sharp eyes and full mouth. He got a haircut, apparently, shortly before their first date. Marty jokes about the style Rust first brought to Louisiana (“shoulda seen it, Laurie, prettiest curls you ever saw”) and Maggie blushes, looks away with vague discomfort. Laurie can’t imagine it; he seems seamless to her, carved from granite.

She feels like she’s dating three people at first—eight of their first ten dates are joint outings. At first she thinks he’s shy; then she thinks Maggie’s tagging along to keep him from saying anything weird, but it seems like that’s an exercise in futility. (On date three, the waiter’s effusive praise of the special—Alaskan salmon—leads to a five-minute diatribe about the American upper-class commodification of rural subsistence. “Asshole acts like he catches fish with his bare hands,” Marty mutters over the rim of his coffee cup. “He uses a lure just like everyone else.”) She suspects that Rust is Maggie and Marty’s Project, the way most couples stain the deck or refinish the basement, and that Rust is, at best, a reluctant participant.

She doesn’t mind at first; he’s not exactly good at small talk, and it takes the edge off. But by date five it’s wearing on her nerves. Not their presence exactly (although a little Marty Hart goes a long way), but the way that she and Maggie seem to fade into transparency when the two men are together. They bicker like old marrieds, their gestures mirroring, speech patterns echoing in ways that Marty and Maggie’s don’t; she watches Rust slide the Sweet & Low toward Marty’s coffee or Marty pass Rust the hot sauce when the burgers arrive as if they share some unspoken mental link. She thinks maybe Marty’s spent more time in that car with Rust in the last three years than he has with his wife in thirteen.

It’s unnerving, sometimes, just a little, when she remembers who they are and what they’ve done. There’s a look the two of them get—Rust more obviously, tension outlining his shoulders while Marty’s stay relaxed, but both of them do it. Their eyes drag across a room when they enter, locating exits, scanning for suspicious persons. Mountain cats pretending to be men.

Other times it feels like three against one. Maggie was raised up north, like her, but they’d returned to her father’s home state when she was a teenager—big-shot engineer for the oil companies, something like that.  This place is second nature to her now; the three of them fall easily into dialect, conversation peppered with college football stats and the best places for Carolina-style vs. Kansas City-style barbeque. Laurie’s increasingly aware of the correctness with which Rust speaks when he’s with her, and how quickly it drops off around Marty and Maggie—verbs inconsistently conjugated, g’s vanishing from the ends of words, sentences collapsing in a heap of  _might coulds_ and  _all y’alls,_  long, slow vowels drizzling out like honey. Sometimes Laurie is beset by a niggling certainty that Rust divides the world into the Harts and Everyone Else; that Everyone Else is not quite real or, at the very least, not quite worth his attention; and that the jury’s still out on which category Laurie belongs to.

She brings pierogi to the house one Friday night.  Rust eats them like he eats everything else, neatly and politely but with no clear indicators of enthusiasm.  Maggie chatters about her mother’s best friend’s aunt’s recipe.  Marty just makes a face, but eats half the plate later when no one’s looking.

iv.

Laurie—she’s only a little embarrassed by this—likes television. She wasn’t allowed to watch it much as a child (only when her homework was done, and there was always more homework). She loves her job, but it’s mentally and physically taxing, and she relishes evenings on the couch with a big glass of red wine and her favorite reality shows.

She expects him to snottily inform her that he doesn’t own a TV; she’s dated a few men like that, and he seems like the type. Instead he averts his eyes and admits it begrudgingly, as if he’s been found out. He takes his place beside her on the couch without comment but eyes the appliance distrustfully, like an alien artifact.

It’s three months before she gets a look at the inside of his apartment.  “I’m starting to think you’re hiding dead bodies in there,” she says.  

“I am,” he answers tonelessly, his eyes never leaving the menu. She’s still trying to figure out when he’s being deadpan and when he’s just not really paying attention to her. He gets stuck in his own head a lot, but she’s surprised to find she’s okay with it. She’s had boyfriends who paid attention to her before; often as not it’s exhausting and time-consuming.

It’s true, it turns out; there are dead bodies everywhere.  Bodies stacked in corners, bodies pinned to the walls, in black and white and vivid color.  Strangulation, laceration, evisceration. It doesn’t bother her, much; she did her share of autopsies in med school.

“It’s pretty much the same what we do, you and me,” he’d said on their second date. “I’m just comin’ at it from the other side.”

v.

He’s not as standoffish as he seems, doesn’t flinch or pull back when she burrows into his shoulder or takes his hand, even in public. Never one to initiate contact, though, except in bed, where he’s got the surest hands she’s ever known. Sometimes she wakes the next morning and finds fingertip-bruises on her hipbones, circling her thighs. He notices once and his eyes widen and the blood drains from his face. But the knowledge does not gentle him.

Her last boyfriend always asked whether she’d come. It seemed so considerate at first—the one before that couldn’t have cared less—but she grew to hate it, his sweaty breath against her neck when he said it, his limpid, ingratiating tone. Rust doesn’t ask; he doesn’t need to. He is aware of every flutter in her pulse, every raised degree in body temperature, the imperceptible tightening of thigh muscles; she knows he knows when a wicked grin crosses his face. She’d like to see his control crack, to see desperation and desire cross his face, watch him shatter in her hands. She might have, once—Maggie has intimated about Rust before she knew him, a bruised, fragile thing—but the man she knows now seems like an outcropping of stone, weather-warped but upright and unmovable.

Some people—people like Rust and Maggie—are rocks in a river. Laurie is already beginning to suspect that she’ll have to divert her course for him.

vi.

He’s not like most men and that is, after all, what she wanted. He grills hamburgers, does dishes, fixes her car, and once, when she is running late for work, sews a button on her blouse; he does these things with equal skill and lack of complaint, without assigning gender to them, judging actions by their efficiency and tools by their usefulness.

She imagines him holding a gun the same way he holds a pen, a fork, a steering wheel. She knows he’s killed people, though he won’t say how many, as if the number makes a difference. When he comes over he puts his gun and badge on the mantlepiece, over the fireplace she doesn’t use because it’s never cold enough here. Both of them fight death for a living and so she tells herself they are allies. The gun in its holster reminds her they are not.

She’s starting to suspect that it’s not any value that he places on life that drives his work, but the opposite: that chaos and death are the only things that make sense to him, that he digs through horrors with his bare hands because they are familiar to the touch.  It’s a hunch more than anything else. Conversations turn philosophical late at night, as they must among four people whose jobs require them to walk ethical tightropes day in and day out. She senses Marty watching his partner keenly, as if steeling himself for some strange outburst that doesn’t come. “Trust me, no one wants my opinion on that,” he says once or twice during such what-is-the-meaning-of-life discussions, only a little sullenly, with the air of a man at uneasy truce with the world. He eyes their surroundings—friends, girlfriend, guttering candles peering through Laurie’s half-empty wine glass, decimated plates of eggplant parmigiana—as if he’s struck some sort of deal for these things, traded in his purest, most authentic self for them and is now beginning to reconsider the terms.

He keeps a toothbrush and one crisply ironed shirt at her place. Nothing else. “What else would I leave here, Laurie,” he says with measured patience. Her mind runs over all the men she’s lived with, all the objects they tracked in like dust: t-shirts declaring loyalty to college sports teams, video games in stacks by the television, beer mugs kept frost-cold in the freezer. Family heirlooms, bits of furniture, the usual detritus. Rust owns none of these things.

She never asks him to move in. She’s not sure it would feel any different if he did.

vii.

After six months she insists on dinner at his place for a change.  “I don’t own a table,” he says, in his laconic, infuriating way, where perfectly logical ideas suddenly are no longer open to debate.  As if the idea of owning a table is one of those things that simply does not fit into his worldview, like monotheism or iced coffee.

She folds her hands calmly and reminds herself, for the tenth time this month, that she  _asked_ for low-maintenance.  “I’ll buy you a damn table, Rust.”

“The hell you will.”

He doesn’t mind that she makes more money than him.  It’s a nice change; most men mind a great deal.  But he cannot stomach the thought of her spending a cent on him—“I never had much and I don’t need it.”  It’s the closest he ever gets to talking about his childhood.

She drives around on a Saturday morning from one yard sale to the next until she finds one that doesn’t look too dreadful and haggles the owner down to $10.  She could pay full-price for it, hell, she could buy a brand-fucking-new designer table if she wanted; but she knows he won’t accept it if she did, and she knows he’ll know if she’s lying. (He always knows. She suspects he knows a great deal more about her life than he lets on; he doesn’t abuse the knowledge, never intrudes on her privacy, but it lingers—the feeling of being an insect pinned to a wall, scrutinized.)

 _This is what you spent seven years in med school for_ , she thinks.  _Six figures a year, and you’re up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday paying $10 for a used dining-room table out of concern for your redneck cop boyfriend’s fragile pride_.

She greets him at his door that evening with the table and Vietnamese takeout (they can’t cook at his place, after all; there’s nothing in the kitchen but a can of coffee grounds and a bottle of hot sauce).  He lets her use the lawn chair; it’s more comfortable than the metal one.

Some cases don’t respond well to a course of aggressive treatment, and folding chairs are a quirk she can live with. He only owns two plates, but he washes them both as soon as the meal is done.

viii.

She tells him she loves him seven, maybe eight months in, very late at night, in bed, in the dark. There’s a long silence and then she hears his reply: “there’s a wide berth between what’s said and what is, Laurie.” She wonders whether that means he loves her back but can’t say it, or that he thinks she says it without meaning it, or both, or neither. She’ll still be wondering about it three years later, when it’s finally done with.

“How long were you and Marty dating before he said he loved you?” she asks over brunch the following Sunday.

“About ten minutes,” Maggie replies. “He was pretty drunk, though.”

ix.

Laurie’s spoon clatters restlessly against the saucer. “I mean, don’t get me wrong.  It’s good.  I’m very satisfied.  He’s—generous.”

Maggie doesn’t want to have this conversation, but she’s curious, truth be hold, and she takes the bait.  “If you were satisfied we wouldn’t be talking about it.”  

Laurie taps an Equal packet against her fingers briskly, tearing it open with a decisive gesture that doesn’t match her voice.  “It’s just lately it seems like it takes him awhile to get warmed up.”

Maggie checks off a list in her head of things that could negatively affect sexual performance: depression, anxiety, trauma, alcoholism.  Drug abuse, too, she suspects.  She’s not sure if Laurie knows about any of that stuff, or how much of it Maggie’s supposed to know.  Marty gets chatty when he drinks.

“It’s just sometimes he seems like he’s somewhere  _else_.  The oral is great, obviously—”

The mental image is sudden and invasive. “You really shouldn’t be telling me about this,” she hears herself blurt out.  She sees Laurie pause over the rim of her coffee cup, eyebrows raised.  “I just—I mean—he’s my husband’s partner.  I shouldn’t know about this stuff.”

“Does he ever talk about their relationship?” she asks later that night as she bastes the chicken and Marty dutifully slices tomatoes for the salad.

He snorts. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t even know he was seeing anybody if I hadn’t personally been in attendance for half their dates.”

x.

It’s almost a year before he tells her about Sophia. It doesn’t bother her much that he waited so long to tell her; she’s seen the closing of enough lives, both suddenly and slowly, to know that grief is not a straight line, that there are no rules for how long it will take to pass, and that talking about it is not always the cure-all their culture purports it to be. It bothers her, though—in some ill-defined way that she doesn’t want to examine too closely—that he had told Maggie the night they met.

He can tell immediately by her lack of surprise that she already knew, and the raw, open look on his face shuts down immediately, like the slamming of a heavy door.  It’s not her goddamn fault, she tells herself angrily after he’s gone home; she didn’t make Maggie tell her, and she never asked for this fucked-up four-person relationship, with her best friend acting as proxy for a man who can rant about televangelists for twenty-five minutes straight without stopping for breath but still, after all this time, cannot put his grief into words.

xi.

She goes to a conference in Baltimore and is gone for a week. During that time, something mysterious happens to his cellphone. “It got shot,” he says vaguely, never clarifying whether it was on his person at the time (“don’t worry about me, Laurie, you’ve got enough to worry about”). As a result they don’t speak for five days. She misses him, especially Thursday night when there’s a nice sunset over the hotel pool—he’s fond of sunsets. But she doesn’t miss him as much as she thinks she will, and when she returns he doesn’t give the impression that he’s missed her at all.

She realizes they don’t need each other. There is something unspeakably sad about that, but also strangely reassuring; Maggie and Marty need each other, after all, and everyone but them can see what a fucking trainwreck they are. What Laurie and Rust have is a mutual agreement. An arrangement between consenting adults.

She does love him; she is sure of it. But she loves him the way she loved Rome when she spent a year there her junior year in college, transfixed by its ancient, terrifying beauty. Even after six months, when the sharp edges of the city’s unfamiliarity grew rounded and soft, she always knew it was not home. He loves her, too, in the bracing, merciless way that the North Atlantic loves the shore, because geography has thrown them together and now they can’t be rid of one another.

xii.

Alcohol and alcoholism. Cocaine, heroin, meth. His time in Narcotics and the time just after. Therapy, anxiety, depression, PTSD. His mother. His daughter. His wife. His father, most of the time. Texas (not Alaska, though it’s all content, no context). Parents, children, cars, needles, guns. These are just a few of things she doesn’t know about, or that are known but not spoken of, conversational roadblocks to be skirted around. His past is a mass grave that she stands at the edge of, peering down, trying to make out the shapes of corpses. Trying not to fall in after them.

When she puts her palm along his torso, the three middle fingers of her hand fit neatly into the scars left by bullets; the guns that held them, and the hands that held the guns, are unknown to her. There is something obscene in the gesture, and he senses it, too; grabs her hand and draws it back from his side.

She’s just something there to fill in the space left by the bulletholes, she knows. Their life together is an experiment on his part, an attempt at walking around in the world like one of the living.

She pities him. But it isn’t enough.

xiii.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t know him at all.” Laurie’s gaze is searching:  _You know him_ , it seems to say.  _Explain_. Maggie feels like she’s in junior high again, at the board in front of the classroom, and Rust Cohle is a particularly tricky algebra problem.  _Baby, trust me, you do not want to pick this man’s brain_.

She thinks of that first double date: Rust shuffling over to the table to meet Jen, a gangling skeleton in a too-loose tie, cheeks hollowing out with every drag on his cigarette, not making eye contact when he shook her hand and muttered “Rustin.” She remembers that stupid synesthesia conversation she would have twenty times in twenty ways over the next few years. “So when something feels good, does that mean it feels  _twice_  as good? Like in two different ways?” Jen had asked with that coy little half-grin. Friendly and warm, but there was something calibrated about that smile—flirty but not  _too_  forward.

“Uh, it could, yeah,” he stammered, a bit pale, and then his eyes cut to Maggie and she saw the plea there:  _don’t make me do this, I’m not ready_. He was a surprisingly good dancer, though, from the looks of it, though he looked a bit like a battered windup toy going through once-familiar motions. Laurie wouldn’t even recognize that guy now, that flattened roadside cardboard box in the shape of a man, and she wouldn’t accept that Rust has gotten as steady as he’s ever likely to get. She lives in a world where broken bones can be set, where things either kill you or they don’t. Maggie can’t explain Rust, not in any words that Laurie would understand.

“Do you really need to know any more than you do?” Maggie finally says. “He won’t ever cheat on you, you know that. He’ll never hit you.”  _He won’t ever leave you, either_ , Maggie suspects but does not say, because she thinks sooner or later he may drive Laurie to leave him. “Look—he  _respects_ you. More than most men respect most women, a whole hell of a lot more than he respects anyone else—isn’t that enough?” She shrugs and stabs at her salad with a fork. “So you don’t know him, so what. Older I get, I think no one knows anyone. Not really.”

“You know Marty.”

“That’s not what I meant.” What she meant was:  _Marty doesn’t know me._

xiv.

She makes mental lists of reasons they’re a good match, evidence of a healthy relationship. Signs and symptoms. They’re both introverts, intellectuals, servants of the public good. They like soul music and long drives and Japanese food. They both dislike clutter. She hopes that if she compiles a long enough list she can convince them both it will work out; they are, after all, infinitely logical people.

What they have in common is their work, the unspeakable fragility of bodies; and what are relationships, after all, but two bodies stitched together uneasily at the edges, pulling at the seams? In her more cynical moments (and she has more of them than she’d like to admit) she wonders whose methods will determine the ending. Whether she will be the one to declare time of death and draw a crisp white sheet over the whole affair, or whether their love—if love is what this is—will be found splayed out in a field somewhere, with Rust ruminating over the remains and jotting observations in his notebook.

xv.

If she asks him to move in, he will say no. But if she brings up children, she’s not sure what he’ll say, and not-knowing is almost the same as hope. Maybe if he can envision them as a family, a future, he could begin to wrap his head around the idea of couches and stocked pantries and televisions. It was a stupid idea, and that’s what eats at her the most, after; she’d always been the smart one in every relationship. She never expected that he could just— _remove_  himself from her life as seamlessly as he had come into it, excise her like a malfunctioning organ.

She assumes the argument had blown over, until about three days later when he flies into an unexpected rage about the newspaper article she keeps framed in the living room. “Who told you to put that fucking thing there?” he spits furiously. “What the hell made you think I wanted to look at it every fucking time I come over here?”

She remembers the hospital’s Christmas party that first year; he’d come willingly enough but lingered at Marty’s elbow all night and gripped a cup of punch so tightly she could see the plastic bending under his fingers. “He’s bad at parties,” Marty said with a sidelong grin at Rust, as if it were an inside joke.

Everyone had recognized them from the papers; everyone wanted to shake their hands. Marty was gregarious enough, though his smile grew brittle as two hours bled into three, but Rust had looked like the skin was trying to crawl off his bones. It was only their third date but she already felt protective of him somehow ( _maternal_ , she thinks now, and it leaves a sour taste in her mouth), took to steering him away every time the conversation took a turn in that direction. “Appreciate it,” he’d muttered, his voice shaking slightly.

She was proud of him, proud of what he’d done, and the newspaper article in the living room reminded her of that. She just wanted to think of him as someone who saves lives, like her, instead of someone who simply presides over the wreckage. She didn’t realize until too late that the child he’s carrying in the photo is dead.

xvi.

“I think he’s ducking my calls.”

“What is this, eighth grade?”

“Look—just— _call_  him, will you? I just want to make sure he hasn’t been shot or something. Again, I mean.”

Maggie hangs up wearily, not wanting to make the call. Marty left an obscure message on her voicemail that afternoon—“Rust’s dragged me to Abbeville on some wild goose chase”—something barely audible, “it’s a goddamn public phone, Rust, I told you, this is  _pointless_ —I’ll be home late, honey.” She’s worried that it’s the same old bullshit, although he never used Rust for cover before. Worried that she’ll call and he won’t know where Marty is or, worse, that she’ll hear the lie in his voice.  _I’m working late, honey. I’m fine, Mom._ Rust is the only honest thing left in her life.

Doesn’t matter, anyway—if he’s not picking up for Laurie surely he won’t pick up for her—but he does, halfway through the second ring. “Maggie? Everything all right?”

Marty in the background: “What in the hell is my wife doing callin’ you?” She feels a flash of guilt for mistrusting him, and then annoyance at his jealousy, and then a flicker of unease ( _why_ _did_ _you answer, Rust?_ ).

“Call Laurie,” she says, a little impatiently, “she thinks you’re avoiding her.”

She can feel the temperature drop over the line. She thinks of how he once described Alaska at the coldest, cruelest time of the year—black skies with white pinpoints of starlight so bright they hurt your eyes. Black skies above, too, when he said it, though humid; they’d been grilling in the backyard, and he tipped his chair back to look at the stars, cigarette smoke unfurling from his fingertips in long ribbons. “Felt like the indifference of God,” he’d said, and Marty had snorted—but Maggie could  _feel_  that chill, somehow, in his voice. She hears it now.

“Thanks for the message,” he says, “but it’s really none of your business.” He hangs up.

xvii.

When she starts feeling them pull away from each other, Maggie starts pulling back, too. She’s not sure they would have stayed friends this long—doctors and nurses usually don’t, as a rule—if not for this invisible band tying them together, these two men who seem inexplicably linked in spite of the fact that Marty still refers to Rust as “that psycho sonofabitch” at least once a week.  Once Laurie’s done with Rust, she suspects that Laurie will be done with her as well. And if not, Maggie doesn’t want to be part of the messiness of a breakup, where you divvy up friends along with furniture and silverware.

(If she’s asked to choose between them, she won’t even hesitate. It shames her, a little.)

“I brought up the idea of having children.” Laurie admits it hesitantly, as if embarrassed.

And Maggie—God forgive her, she can’t help it— _laughs_.  Just a bit, but it’s bubbling up inside her mouth before she can stop it.  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,  _but_ — _children_?  With  _Rust_?”  She puts down her spoon and leans across the table.  “You—you know about his daughter, right?  I mean, please tell me he told you about that.”

“You told me,” Laurie responds with a bitterness Maggie can’t quite work out. “But that was a long time ago—”

“I don’t imagine there’s an expiration date on that sort of thing, and—” it’s mean and petty, but she can’t stop herself, she’s  _never_ been able to stop herself—“if you’d ever been a parent, you wouldn’t think so, either.”

“You’re  _just_ like him sometimes, you know that?  Nasty and cruel.” Laurie narrows her eyes, stabs her straw angrily through the lid of her cup.  “I thought he might change.  People change, Maggie.”

Rust a rag doll at her countertop, eyes just a little too wide, a little desperate:  _that’s the thing, I think I am better._   Marty’s been out all night three times in the last two weeks.  “People might, but _men_ don’t, and certainly not Rust fucking Cohle.  God, it’s like you don’t even  _know_ him.”  She’s not sure why she’s goading Laurie this way, but she does know that it makes her feel better, and right now that’s enough.

Laurie leans back in her chair, crosses her arms.  “Not as well as  _you_ , obviously.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Nothing.” She grabs her bag, shoves her wallet into it and pushes back forcefully from the table. 

“I’m sorry, Laurie,” she says.

“Yeah, that’s what he said.” She stands and shoves her chair back into place so hard it nearly topples over. “And the fuck you are. This way you’re just one step closer to what you’ve wanted all along.”

xviii.

Looking back, she’s horrified at how long it had taken her to realize. Rust knew it the moment the word “children” had fallen from her lips. Maggie knew it, which means even Marty fucking Hart, in all his infinite wisdom, knew it. It’s another two weeks before Laurie can admit to herself that this is no longer a relationship. It’s just a burial service.

The end is a crisp white sheet pulled up over the corpse. “I’ve been offered a job in Lafayette,” she says.

She hasn’t seen his cigarettes in three years, although she knows he never quit. They appear now, like a conjuror’s trick. He doesn’t look at her as he lights one and she’s suddenly, painfully aware that he’s never going to make eye contact with her, ever again. He’s put her in the other box already, the one where the disposable masses reside; the Harts, and everyone else. “Don’t fuck around with the passive voice, Laurie,” he says in his cop-voice, a long, slow, mildly contemptuous drawl. “You  _applied_  for a job in Lafayette.”

She doesn’t expect to see him again, but a week later he brings by a box of things she’s left at his place: books he’d borrowed, one on spinal trauma and another on internal bleeding; a Baton Rouge General ballpoint pen; half a bottle of perfume. She’s not sure whether he wants to see her one last time, or just wants to drive home the fact that he won’t be encumbered by superfluous material goods.

He’d taken his single extra shirt with him the last time he left; the toothbrush she’d left, rather passive-aggressively, in Maggie’s locker. He chain-smokes through their conversation. His cheekbones look sharper than she remembers.

“It’s for the best,” she says. “That I got this job, I mean. It makes things easier.”

“You always did take the path of least resistance.” He’s leaning against the wall by the bedroom door, not looking at her but at her reflection in the mirror over the dresser, raising and lowering the cigarette like an automaton. All the fight seems to have gone out of him, somehow.

“And you always go out of your way to make things harder for yourself,” she retorts. “Like you’re not living authentically if you’re not miserable.” She throws clothes into a box haphazardly, knowing she’ll just have to repack it all later. His presence always makes her uncomfortably aware of how much  _stuff_ she owns. “And  _you’ve_  been taking the path of least resistance ever since you realized you wouldn’t have kids with me, so don’t start, you fucking coward.” She stops and brushes a sweaty lock of hair off her forehead; why is it always so fucking  _hot_  here? “Would you have ever left? If I hadn’t—how long would you have hung on, lying to me, to yourself, if I hadn’t made it easy for you?”

“You woulda been gone soon enough anyway.”

He says it with such quiet certainty that she’s taken aback. She thinks about the mother he’s never mentioned, the wife whose name she still doesn’t know, and she realizes she’s just one more in a long line. She’s ashamed, and the shame makes her lash out. “That’s not fair. That’s not  _fucking_ fair. You’re the one who  _left_ , Rust. You haven’t been here for weeks, not really. You—”

“Laurie.” There’s a weary patience in his voice she’s never heard before. An image leaps to her mind uninvited, one of such abject horror and loveliness that she feels tears prick at the back of her throat: Rust, younger and gentler than she ever knew him, coaxing his infant daughter to sleep. That’s what he sounds like, a tired adult talking to a fussy child. She wants him to leave before she begins to cry.

He rips the cellophane off a fresh pack of cigarettes. “I don’t blame you. I don’t—I don’t expect anything different of you. You did your best with me.”

She sits on the bed wearily and closes the cardboard box. Fuck it; she can fold the clothes when she gets to Lafayette.

He straightens up, turns to leave. “I’ll stay in touch,” she blurts out, not wanting her last words to him to be spoken in anger. That’s what adults do, wasn’t it? They give each other space, don’t have expectations, don’t make ultimatums, promise to stay in touch. God, they’d gone about it all wrong, hadn’t they? Marty and Maggie, with their stupid jealous screaming clutching teenage love, they’d never be rid of each other entirely. But she and Rust, oh, they had to be  _adults_  about it, and now here they are, dropping out of one another’s lives as easily as you’d switch insurance providers. She feels sick.

“No, you won’t. You shouldn’t.” He lights his cigarette off the smoldering stub of the previous one. He still hasn’t looked at her. “Good luck in Lafayette, Laurie. I’m sure you’ll do a lot of good there.”

The tears don’t finally come until she hears his truck pulling away.


End file.
